Selections from FM GALICIA
24.11
When you live in the mountains, firewood becomes an important part of your life, like bread, milk, a bed, a shirt, a warm jacket. Firewood becomes an extension of you—it’s as if it’s a part of your body. You see condensed warmth in that timber, without which your body ceases to be yours. Upon it, in fact, your existence is dependent. And a pile of logs can be regarded as a peculiar anatomical structure that is part of your organism. That’s why you can’t even think of treating it as something that is foreign or supernatural; you just want to make sure there’s lots of it.
Up against the walls, arranged stacks such as these transform houses into true fortresses. In such a lair, one can survive any attack. And they will come. The frost will press up against the walls so hard that the wooden framework inside will crack and, at least a couple of times, the snow will blow up against the door so that you’ll have to climb out through the window, crawl over the snow heaps up to the door and shovel the snow. The wind will transform the windows into vibrating membranes and the chimney and the attic into territories settled by various unfamiliar creatures.
And then your choice is simple—don’t burn it, and become one with the wind, the frost and the snow, or burn it, and transform the wood into warmth for your body.
That’s after you’ve lived in the mountains for a while. Winter’s progression, its calendar, its marked-off days—all of these are traced by the gradual shrinking of that pile of wood.
But when you only come to the mountains occasionally, firewood is not treated as daily bread but as some kind of delicacy, as gourmet food, like a cordial. My firewood, in fact, is most similar to aged cognac. Because, in addition to last year’s spruce logs, I also have a stash of beech logs that has been stored for over twenty years. They are pure white, almost transparent, and sonorous. And they provide a warmth that is simultaneously intense and delicate, and, most importantly—long lasting. They’ve learned not to hurry. It seems to get warmer when you’re just holding such a log in your hand.
In Austria, they use such aged beech to make crucial components for violins. From one of my logs, they could make about twenty. I am aware of how many violins I have burned over all these years, I am aware how much money I could have made, had I just taken one suitcase full of logs to Vienna. But I also know that I’ll continue to burn them little by little, offering them to my friends and children, as one offers conversation or wine. And I’ll spill the ashes onto the plot where garlic spends the winter, awaiting its time. Let it warm up as well.
Translated by Mark Andryczyk